I am delighted to welcome Emma James to the UCSF Library as the Industry Document Library’s new project archivist. Emma will be working with the Industry Documents Library team to process and make public millions of documents in our growing Juul Labs Collection. Emma started her professional journey in the museum field, with a concentration in collection management. Based on her graduate research pursuits, she sought to focus her work towards digital preservation work, most recently applied to long-term archiving of digitized and born-digital artwork assets.
She has specialized experience in the preventative conservation, storage and access of born-digital artwork, and has been a long-time advocate for the adoption of library and archive best practices within the art world and museum field at large. She has presented her graduate research on digital preservation planning and implementation in museum circles such as the California Association of Museums and the Western Museum Association.
Emma holds a degree in art history from University of California, Santa Barbara and in museum studies from San Francisco State University.
More about Emma
During her previous tenure working with the Kramlich Collection (based in San Francisco and Napa Valley), a significant private collection and archive of film and media-based art, Emma developed customized appraisal and ingest protocols, preservation workflows, and collection-wide standards for digital records. She worked with the archives of renowned artists such as Sir Isaac Julien, Matthew Barney, Marina Abramović, Shirin Neshat, Bruce Nauman, and Steve McQueen. Emma looks forward to joining the library and archive fields after years of applying best practices in the art world.
She is a member of several professional groups including the American Alliance of Museums, California Association of Museums, Western Association of Museums and the Museum Computer Network. Additionally, Emma has served as a board member for the Museum Studies Special Interest Group at San Francisco State for three years.
Outside of her professional pursuits, Emma enjoys a mixture of indoor and outdoor activities. She is engaged within two long-running book clubs (one classic, the other for graphic novels). Her other interest include playing the piano, cooking and baking new recipes, and knitting projects. She is often spending time on weekends hiking at an archery range in Pacifica, walking her small canine side-kick at the beach, or picnicking in Golden Gate park with friends and family.
Feature image citation: Unknown. ART-2223_TRADE SHOW 7ELEVEN ONE SHEET. 2018 September 07. JUUL Labs Collection. University Libraries, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/xskh0285